Tape Control

This application allows users of OSX 10.2 and above access to SCSI tape drives via STDIN and STDOUT so that utilities such as tar, hfstar, pax, hfspax or any other application which writes to STDOUT may be used to archive files to tape on an OSX system.

The application also makes remote backups to tape possible via the use of ssh and hfspax. You can setup a central backup server containing your tape drives and issue a command from a terminal window on the backup server such as:

ssh -n root@aremotemachinetobebackedup hfspax -wxcpio /someremotedirtobebackedup | tapecontrol -d1 -w

and effectively create a client server backup solution using only freely available tools. Obviously, hfspax needs to be installed on the remote machine and also rsa keys need to be setup for ssh passwordless authentication between the two machines to do this from with a CRON job but it does work.

This code is being released under the GPL (General Public License).

This is ALPHA quality software!!! I have only tested it internally and it does NOT provide support for all tape drives (but your help could rememdy that problem).

Please report any success's or failures to al at kirkus dot org.

Code enhancements/hacks/workarounds/fixes should also be forwarded to the above email address.

The driver only currently supports read/write/write filemark/forward filemark/backward filemark/rewind and a few inquiry pieces. It is far from finished but it is getting my backups written to tape for me. Maybe it will work for you too.

Source Code Disk Image - XCode- (tapecontrol v.01)

binary executable tested under 10.28 and 10.3 (tapecontrol v.01)

Known issues:

Currently only support for variable block size devices is supported.

Testing has only been done using Quantum SDLT 1 and SDLT 2 tape drives using adaptec and atto controllers.

Does not currently have the ability to span multiple tapes with a single archive.

Many media error handling features could be greatly improved. Right now the prog just drops out with a return value of 1